I was a TA and instructor for several programming classes, usually in Java, with which I was moderately experienced but not an expert.

My students would frequently ask how to accomplish something, how syntax or keywords worked on q deeper level, whether there was a stl class for a purpose, or what caused an error, etc, that I didn't know about already. I didn't hide my ignorance even a little bit, but Idid help them find an answer. In lecture settings, if it wasn't too much of a digression, I'd demonstrate finding the answer. In one on one help, or one on group help, I'd lead them through finding the answer themselves. My students had a lot of respect for me as an authority on the language and still listened to my advice and came to me with questions frequently.

This is kinda important across all fields, but especially in programming, you don't need to know the right answer by rote so much as you need to be able to seek and identify the right answer with some independence using existing resources.

Absolutely. Demonstrating how to Google (and now, how to ChatGPT) is important. The pervasiveness of Java makes it relatively easy to do.

I'm reminded of a high school programming class where a project partner named variables with the most crude and lewd words he could imagine. Not that I was prudish, but he unsurprisingly never remembered what "butts" was for and somehow never figured out why he kept getting confused by his own code.

For school once I had to write a program called "Poetry Writer". Basically it would take input text, build a linked list(taking in account proceeding and following words) with for each word and output a randomized version of the poem.

I HAD to of course name all of my variables as poets and poems.

So you have "Edgar_Allen gets new The_Road_Not_Taken", all was fine during my tests but for some reason it did not interface well with the code provided by the teacher to do the actual input so I had to take it to the TA for help.

I then learnt why descriptive names, not just comments are helpful. Although, the TA was impressed by my selections XD

Butts ARE distracting sometimes.

Agree, looking for the multi upvote button

I mean can't you just have the input signal to the light be a disjunction of signals? So it's on if the camera is on OR if some programmatic signal says turn it on?

I don't see why they should be mutually exclusive

I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.

The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic

I very much read it as I responded, and re-reading, still interpret it as such.

Kirkules is correct.

My apologies, I stand corrected.

But the discussion wasn't about "generic at-will" employment. It started as "American at-will" employment.

> > I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers

It may seem like you can just walk away from a job but realistically most people can't.

"Most people" are not dependent on health insurance for their average needs, except in the long-term or unexpectedly.

Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.

It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.

My wife was once a day light on her birth control. Nine months later, she delivered a boy.

For most women of child bearing age, between birth control and annual visits, healthcare is pretty important.

Birth control is available over the counter in the US. If you have specific need, it’s very cheap and your doctor will almost always just call in refills without charging you. The meds themselves are not expensive.

Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.

And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.

Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…

If you lose healthcare """insurance""" when you lose your job, you never had real insurance to start with.

(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)

I can remember a number of instances of having to dive into design docs to ascertain how a few systems interacted with each other.

I bet a lot of the time it might be good enough to just have a "here's the set of options we went with" version of a design proposal/doc as documentation

Do you have, offhand, any names or references to point me toward why you think fish and lizards can make rapid common sense deductions about man made objects they couldn't have seen in their evolutionary histories?

Also, separately, I'm only assuming but it seems the reason you think these deductions are different from hard wired answers if that their evolutionary lineage can't have had to make similar deductions. If that's your reasoning, it makes me wonder if you're using a systematic description of decisions and of the requisite data and reasoning systems to make those decisions, which would be interesting to me.

Some adjectives stack, like "terribly".

Though maybe there's some kind of strong enough diminishing effect on emphasis value such that any number of "terribly"s still has bounded effect XD

It's weird to me for "ease factor" to be an intrinsic property of a card/thing to learn at all. I study things like Chinese characters with Anki and it's not but just rote memorization, there are systems and structures of knowledge for each card's content to be integrated into. For Chinese characters (as with many other things) there's history, etymology, deconstruction into components, personal mnemonics and associations, literary context and references, etc., all of which affects how easy it is for me to learn any one card's content. Usually i do not initially know much for a given card, but other cards and external learning will make any given card easier over time than it initially was.

And the set of external factors for any card is not fixed; there's no "true ease factor" for a card, because the set of external factors i will probably encounter is not a fixed (determinism aside) property of a card. It depends on me and my changing state.